We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. Albert Bates, author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Hot Brain Cool Brain

Lion and wolf cubs, when they learn to stalk prey, learn
fairly quickly that they must delay the urge for immediate gratification if
they are to be successful. They have to cultivate patience.

Babies who are taken to their mother's breast whenever they
cry do not learn this as early. Those allowed milk only after they stop crying, and
maybe even then not right away, learn patience.

Last month Walter Mischel gave a Long Now talk that eventually found its way to our earbuds as we bicycled through Amish
country in Southern Tennessee.

It is wheat harvest time here and Amish men are out scything
the sheaves, tying bundles, and forming them into shocks to field dry in the
sun. When the wheat has cured, the shocks will be collected by horse wagon and
carried back to the barn for threshing. The Amish abide in the Long Now.

Walter Mischel’s psychology experiment at
Stanford in the 1960s took students from the Bing Nursery School, put them in a
room one-by-one, gave them a choice of a cookie, mint, pretzel, or marshmallow
and the following deal: they could eat the treat right away, or wait 15 minutes
until the experimenter returned. If they waited, they would get an extra treat.

Michel and his team then went behind the
one-way glass and filmed for 15 minutes.

Footage of these experiments, which were
conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay
gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their
hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the
desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny
stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully
around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo,
delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before
returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.

The genius of the experiment was not in discovering
what percentage of children delayed gratification and how that might correlate
to sex, age, race, ethnicity or income, but in following the children with a
longitudinal study for the rest of their lives.

As they
matured and became adults, the kids who had shown the ability to wait got
better grades, were healthier, enjoyed greater professional success, and proved
better at staying in relationships—even decades after they took the test. They
were, in short, better at life.

In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester added
more nuance to the original work.
In "Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability,"
Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard N. Aslin tested children who had little
reason to trust that the scientists would return in 15 minutes versus a control
group of children who were more likely to have trust. Children raised in
homeless shelters or alleys, for instance, have much less faith in the
reliability of their environments, or adult authorities, than children who are
raised in stable family settings surrounded by environmental constancy.

What do children plucked from bus
station bathrooms do when told that if they delay gratification they will get a
bigger reward? They eat the treat right away. While the study is too recent to
track those kids for a lifetime, the long term effects of mistrustful childhood
do not require a leap of imagination.

Kidd et al report:

The results of our
study indicate that young children’s performance on sustained
delay-of-gratification tasks can be strongly influenced by rational
decision-making processes. If self-control capacity differences were the
primary causal mechanism implicated in children’s wait-times, then information
about the reliability of the environment should not have affected them. If
deficiencies in self-control caused children to eat treats early, then one
would expect such deficiencies to be present in the reliable condition as well
as in the unreliable condition. The effect we observed is consistent with
converging evidence that young children are sensitive to uncertainty about
future rewards.

***

To be clear, our data
do not demonstrate that self-control is irrelevant in explaining the variance
in children’s wait-times on the original marshmallow task studies. They do,
however, strongly indicate that it is premature to conclude that most of the
observed variance—and the longitudinal correlation between wait-times and later
life outcomes—is due to differences in individuals’ self-control capacities.
Rather, an unreliable worldview, in addition to self-control, may be causally
related to later life outcomes, as already suggested by an existing body of
evidence.

There is also an existing body of evidence that tells us that
humans are predisposed to disbelieve scientific facts, or even their own
experiences, if they conflict with strongly held beliefs. This is likely the
phenomenon most responsible for our failure not merely to make the cultural
changes required of us to avert climate Armageddon and Near Term Human
Extinction – even simple lifestyle changes like eating lower on the food chain,
cutting discretionary travel, living in a smaller house and having no more than
one child – but our failure to even acknowledge, as individuals or
collectively, that we have a problem. We have chosen instead, to use the words
of Dr. Kidd, an unreliable worldview.

As John Michael Greer says, human
beings are like yeast. They respond to increased access to food and energy with
increased reproduction. In other words, marshmallows make us horny.

Our cockeyed worldview has a concatenation of causes. We are
products of the religious views of our parents. We inhabit a globalized culture
that infantilizes us while it trains us to become dedicated followers of
fashion. We like hearing the sound of
our "own" voice in our heads. Add all that up and it amounts to
simmering distrust. We are not at all prepared to delay gratification. The
average child in Kidd's study waited only 6 minutes.

In his Long Now talk and in his book, The Marshmallow Test,
Walter Mischel spoke of our internal dialog in terms of a conflict between the
"hot brain" that wants to operate on impulse and take what is right
in front of it, and "cool brain," that is willing to wait, willing to
trust, and then to reap the greater rewards.

Those who find themselves more often on the winning side –
whether in athletics, business, politics or relationships – are those who have
cool brains. They play the long game.

All too often they use the inabilities of opponents to see
that long game to pad their advantage. That
is how they get ahead.

Climate change and the existential threat it holds cannot
even be perceived without a long view. It needs a cool brain, not a hot one.
But there is a self-reinforcing feedback being played out here that does not
work in favor of our species. Climate change weirds the normal course of
things. It makes the environment for everyone unreliable. It seeds distrust. It
makes brains hot.

The question then becomes, how can we develop cool brains?
Mischel suggests several techniques of ideation that can help build
self-control. What is clear, however, is that the best self-control starts
early in life and is built upon a foundation of trust. The environment a child
experiences will affect how much trust they can invest in adults, their culture
-- its rules and social responsibilities -- and their future. Take away
stability and trust from children and the effects of that loss ripple out to
very large consequences for everyone.

"By changing cognitive skills and motivation, we can
use the cool system to regulate the hot system," Mischel says. "Is it
all pre-wired? My answer is an emphatic no."

Attention control strategies and
cognitive transformations/reappraisals can 'cool' the immediate temptations and
'heat' the delayed consequences is what's important.

***

The point I am trying to make is
that if we are going to talk seriously about taking long term consequences like
climate change into account, we've got to make the consequences hot. We have to
really make them hot. And that's not easy to do.

One of the reasons that it is not
easy to do is because that limbic system, that hot system that activates automatically
when you have high stress, is there for good reason.

We have often wondered whether continuing to write scary
tomes about our future is an effective strategy. Mischel says it is and we need
more of it. But we also need to cool our brains once they have grasped hot
consequences.

His advice is to narrow the economic class divide, teach
self-control in schools, assume everyone is capable of improving their skills,
and stop creating new victims of biological and social biographies.

Mischel’s main worry
is that, even if his lesson plan proves to be effective, it might still be
overwhelmed by variables the scientists can’t control, such as the home
environment. He knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks—the
real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of
diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says.
“Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do
they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to
Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking
before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas
morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves
how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied
with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every
kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t
have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ “

--
Jonah Lehrer

From the presidential campaign now playing out in the United
States and similar dramas in Brazil, Philippines and elsewhere, we can surmise that a
cool brain standard is not in the immediate offing. It is easy to see the distinctions
between the many hot brain / instant gratification candidates and constituencies, whose
policies would widen the class divide, rekindle the Cold War and heat the
planet, and the rare cool brain / calm and steadfast candidates and constituencies, who
want to end divisive rhetoric, level the playing field, and pursue a path to
real progress in peace, justice and transformative change.

Voting these days is like choosing between the hot faucet
and the cold faucet, but only the hot faucet works.

Watching the Amish gather in the sheaves we see a culture
that invests in trust. Children grow up relying on adults to be steadfast,
seasons to come and go, and the good earth to provide. They learn self-denial
and delayed gratification early. It becomes a joyful practice because it
underpins a greater love of community, and the return of community love for
each member.

Humans are capable of these things. We are capable of
designing entire societies that function this way. Whether we choose to act
rationally, with self-control, and not on impulse, is simply a matter of choice.

3 comments:

wow was this ever a great and useful piece. AB you did it again. we need more traction on the strategy of hot alarmist news and stories about ACD because most activists I know think that is the way to scare people AWAY from action. But my family of four siblings all now between 56 and 62 raised in same stable family where got the same set of delayed gratification rituals, like the ones you list above, has not proven the case. to the contrary my three siblings and their kids routinely fly for vacations, have energy intensive hobbies and eat high on the food chain. None thinks their actions matter for mitigating ACD, carbon ppm, etc. None is prepared to forgo consumption pleasures for the sake of their children/grandchildren.

Albert- You kind of touched on it, but I would emphasize that gardening, farming, and actually participating in raising your own food is a repetitive, powerful experience in delayed gratification that the great majority of the U.S. population has no exposure to. Yes, parental modeling is paramount, but I would say that this disconnect from the seasonal cycles of effort resulting in harvest results in less ability to see the long time frame and is another side effect of the unsettling of America.

Greer's July 27 post on Environmental Activism Postmortem misses the point made here, that negative news has to be included to alert people to a crisis and matched with a 'cool brain' action plan to empower people to engage. There is a very powerful human emotion that, while sad to point out, could very well work in our favor as we approach the bottleneck: grief and direct loss.Pondering very viscerally about what we have to lose could very well spur the compassion to take action that is critical to our own survival.

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Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

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